Thursday, April 26, 2012

A Professor of South Asian History at Trinity College Hartford, Connecticut, Vijay
Prashad, commented on French India-based journalist François Gautier. He wrote “Hindu
Holocaust?”, published on www.newsindia-times.com
(25 Sep. 2009), in reaction to Gautier’s opening of a “Hindu Holocaust” museum
in Pune. Actually it got a more positive name, referring to the successful
freedom struggle by Shivaji, which in turn drew a lot of flak from the Hindu
nationalist side. Hindus unaware of the Jewish touchiness regarding the alleged
misuse of the term “Holocaust” (in fact first used for the Armenian genocide by
the Turks, which took the form of the destruction by fire of the Armenian-held
town of Urfa), and of how the reference to the Holocaust would obviously put
the Jewish suffering in the centre instead of the Hindu suffering that is the
object of the museum, held it against Gautier that he seemingly went soft on what
happened to the Hindus. At any rate, a museum was devotedto the Hindu-Muslim struggle, and Vijay
Prashad didn’t like that.

Vijay Prashad is a familiar type: a Nehruvian secularist, i.e. an
institutional winner but a loser on contents. He was one of the people who
clamoured, after my Ayodhya lecture in Madison WI 1996, that “a scholarly
rebuttal should be given”, but whose scholarly rebuttal is still awaited. For a
while he took part in a debate with Rajiv Malhotra, for which a whole yahoo
list wascreated, but he wimped out. On
the Hindu Holocaust too, he takes comfortable conformistic positions but he has
never written a serious rebuttal of the “Hindu nationalist” (actually purely
historical) theory that Muslims killed millions of Hindus.

So, let’s see what he got worked up about. In the main, it is money: “A
fundraiser in New Jersey on Aug. 16 raised $50,000 for a ‘Hindu Holocaust’
museum to be built in Pune. The museum is the brainchild of a Frenchman,
Francois Gautier, and is under the auspices of the Viraat Hindu Sabha (VHS).
They claim that over the past thousand years, millions of Hindus were killed,
with the intention to wipe Hindus off the map.”

The intention is mostly in the eye of the beholder, though I cannot
exclude that there are genuinely are some Hindus in America who believe that
the Muslims had the intention to “wipe Hindus off the map”. Some of course had
that intention, but by and large, Muslims are satisfied if Hindus convert. They
can stay on the map, but as Musllims. However, no song need be made about
Hindus dying, sometimes war is an Allah-ordained necessity, and so, Hindus have
died by the millions. We need not even look very far: of the one to three
victims of the Bangladesh war in 1971, most were Hindus, totally dwarfing those
who were killed in religious riots in remainder-India since 1947. In 1947 too,
the Hindu refugees from West Panjab killed by their Muslim neighbours far
outnumbered the East Panjabi Muslims who didn’t make it to the Promised Land they
themselves had created.

According to vijay Prashad, “The numbers are vague, as one might expect,
but the culprit is precisely defined: Islam. (…) It reduces the complexity of
the subcontinent's rich history into a simple morality play that has only two
characters: the Hindu and the Muslim. The latter is the invader who has come
and killed the former. Nothing else matters.”

Many other things matter to the Hindu revivalists, as the array of Sangh
Parivar and other Hindu organizations testify. The hyperfocus on the Hindu-Muslim
conflict exists only in the eye of the Nehruvian beholder. But the focus of
this one lone museum is indeed the Hindu-Muslim conflict. That is as it should
be: a conflict spanning more than a millennium and a whole Subcontinent
deserves a museum.

And there’s even more in the eye of the beholder: “The idea of the Hindu
Holocaust casts the Hindu as history's victim, who should now become history's
aggressor to avenge the past.” A leftist and revolutionary like Vijay Prashad
cannot countenance a straight summary of facts, he has to imagine a violent “revenge”.
Well, the museum’s object is just to show factual history, and the viewer is
then free to decide on his own reaction.

Speaking of imagination, Viyay Prashad’s runs wild: “But the Hindu was
not always the victim. If you read the historical records carefully, you will
find that many Hindus participated in the slaughter of other Hindus, and that
the Hindu-Buddhist battles of the ancient world were perhaps more bloody than
anything that comes afterward.” Which battles were those? As Sita Ram Goel once
said in this same context: I am asking for one example, not two.” But the
battles in which Islam wiped out Buddhism, in the 10th century in
Afghanistan and then in North India at the end of the 12th, are
well-attested.

With reference to Romila Thapar’s book on Somnath, Vijay Prashad
asserts: “There was killing, but that was as much for reasons of warfare and
plunder as for reasons of God and tradition.” He hasn’t studied Islamic history
at all, else he would know that Mohammed himself commanded ca. 82 raids on
caravans, purely “for reasons of warfare and plunder”, and that these very
raids were the occasion to launch the term jihâd.
In Islam, there is no antagonism between plunder and God.

Of course, he lists cases of Hindu magnanimity as cases of Hindu-Muslim
coexistence, e.g.: “In the 13th century, a local raja, Sri Chada, granted a
merchant from Hormuz the right to build a mosque on temple land. He also
provided the mosque with a disbursement for teachers and preachers, for the
daily reading of the Quran and for the celebration of festivals. The
Veraval-Somanatha inscription of 1264 shows us that even orthodox Shaivite
priests cooperated in the building of the mosques.” He ought to have mentioned
the Vijayanagar king who employed Muslim generals, only to be betrayed by them
during the momentous Battle of Talikota, when they joined the Muslim Army and
inflicted defeat and destruction on Vijayanagar.

Of course Vijay Prashad cannot stand it when foreigners who defy the
description as “Hindu nationalists” agree with the “Hindu Holocaust” scenario: “Gautier’s
(…) work reads like another European apologist for extreme Hindutva, Koenraad
Elst. Both went to strict Catholic schools and now hold a deep animus against
Christian missionaries, but seem to take their venom out mainly against Islam.
Gautier and Elst want to make plain the ‘Muslim genocide against Hindus’. But
neither is a serious student of history, with little idea of how to read
historical texts. They draw more from a misplaced passion than from a real,
sober scientific exploration of the facts. That they are taken seriously is a
sign of the degradation of reason in the world of Hindutva.”

Well well, the loser Vijay Prashad who negates history
but has never been able to produce a single paper establishing his conformistic
whitewash of Islam, is now berating the museum-opener and writer of factual Hindu-Muslim
history as having ‘little idea of how to read historical texts’. Texts of which
he himself leaves the reading to Romila Thapar. As long as the power equations remain
as they are, he will have more success with his lies than we with the facts,
that cannot be helped; but eternity will know Vijay Prashad as a liar.

Meanwhile, he is mistaken in alleging that
Gautier and I “have a deep animus against Christian missionaries”. Both of us
have gone out of our way to explicitate that we have Catholic priests among our
relatives and that we have fond memories of them. At the same time, we have perfectly
rational reasons for having our doubts about the missionary enterprise among
the Hindus. But for those reasons, Vijay Prashad has to substitute an emotional”animus”,
because the eye of the beholder cannot face a rational critique of his favoured
religions.

4 comments:

"As long as the power equations remain as they are, he will have more success with his lies than we with the facts" what a tragedy! This sentence probably speaks everything about history writing in India ! sad !

one can find proof of muslim atrocities as late as 20th century. i hail from telangana region of andhra pradesh which was under nizam rule until 1950. As a child i used to see a number of videos aired on local television(read as channel of town) in which the razzakars were shown to be commiting mass atrocities like rape, bride catching... making them play bathukamma (a community ritual) naked, the list goes on. the people who make these videos are not professionals who gain financially but normal people who had acess to a camera. there is enough substance of proof I believe in these very late instances, atleast the secularists should not be able to deny them. there is a whole struggle for independce during the british rule and they were crushed ruthlessly the story goes on.

Writers like Romila Thapar, Khushwant Singh, Tavleen singh ..and now Vijay Prashad have distorted the history of India to suit the whims and fancies of their masters ..these apologists have gone as far as to not only deny mass murders of Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs by invading muslims but also any riots are blamed on BJP and VHP as instigators. Congress dare blame muslim extremists ever for what they have done recently in Mumbai and Assam. Anybody talking sense or dare say against them are branded as VHP agents.. God Save Bharatvarsha!

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.